Helena Furberg, MSPH & PhD

Current Research Interests

Dr. Furberg is a molecular epidemiologist conducting research to identify factors associated genitourinary cancer etiology and prognosis, and genetic factors associated with smoking behavior. She has led the two largest genetic investigations of smoking behavior among European and African ancestry individuals, both of which identified a region on chromosome 15 significantly associated with how much a person smokes per day. She is Co-PI of the MSKCC Urothelial Cancer Registry and an active member of the International Consortium for Bladder Cancer, which seeks to identify new genetic loci associated with bladder cancer etiology and prognosis. Together with clinical colleagues at MSKCC and at Weill-Cornell, she investigates the impact of smoking on bladder cancer prognosis and the accuracy of self-reported smoking among bladder cancer patients. Dr. Furberg has recently developed collaborations with investigators from the MSKCC Kidney Service to evaluate how risk factors for renal cell carcinoma perform as prognostic factors, and whether they are associated with specific mutational profiles of prognostic significance utilizing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas.